Today's Linux administration puzzler: Why do the files in home directories mounted from another server belong to nobody?
First I looked at /var/log/messages to find out if there were
any messages that might be related. There were indeed:
Jan 12 10:43:02 xxx rpc.idmapd[4383]: nss_getpwnam: name 'xxx@localdomain' does not map into domain 'local.domain.edu'
After a bit of grepping I found out that there was a wrong domain
('local.domain.edu') defined in /etc/idmapd.conf. Fixed.
Restarted rpc.idmapd. Helped one user, didn't help me.
My home directory was still all nobody. I logged out and logged
back in, didn't help. I su'd to root, checked out
/var/log/messages again, but there was nothing relevant any more.
I looked at my home directory once more and now the files were suddenly in my ownership. I don't know why it took a while, but the issue seems to be fixed now.